Blue Stare
by HappierThanMost
Summary: A grown up Ponyboy reflects on tragedy, how it's affected his life and his relationship with his brother.


_For those unfamiliar with my stories, Ponyboy becomes a doctor :)_

**BLUE STARE**

They say that tragedies always come in threes, don't they?

Someone beat me to the couch of the on-call room, so an empty examining area serves as a place to power nap during my downtime at the ER. I turn over on my side and try to get comfortable against the padded table. My scrubs are thin and I don't have a blanket. I tuck my cold hands between my knees and count my tragedies, this newest one, our most devastating of all.

I'm nothing if not seasoned by grief. Hell for a time it's all I knew. But life has a way of lulling you with those halcyon years. Where nothing much really happens but the sprinkling of joyful moments: graduations and weddings, jobs secured, babies born. Grim Reaper likes to leave you alone for a little while. Until you're comfortable enough to let your guard down. And that's exactly when he strikes.

I pass by him in these halls every day. I watch him pick on other people, destroying all he touches. The worst part of my job is announcing his presence, or rather, where he's been; the surrender of a white sheet pulled over a gray and hollowed face, the defeat of a called off resuscitation, a lonely march into a waiting room of the anguished and desperate, holding the countless trembling hands of the bereaved.

I've been on their side a few too many times, but the doctor's side is no picnic. Just like with anything though, if you practice enough you get pretty good at it, whether it's your golf swing, your jump shot, or giving the worst news in the gentlest of ways.

But I come to work for the good news. For the lives saved and the miracles, because most of the time we end up beating the Reaper at his own game in my trauma unit. And in this tiny cubicle, tonight a makeshift fortress set among all the medical chaos, I know the tricks to come down from the high of stress. I've learned exactly how to breathe until I'm drifting somewhere between the meditative state and a vivid awareness, despite the noisy machines beyond these flimsy curtains, the hustling of nurses back and forth blowing them open when they pass, their shorthand language sharp and brisk. I've thrown myself into all this, buried myself in my job. To stay busy, to have some control. To hide? Nobody asks the doctor how he feels. And right now I need it that way.

But the Fates are double dealing and deceitful. And sometimes you're the one who sits in the waiting room in despair, and the weeping wives and broken sons are part of your own family. _Oh, how his sons broke._

No God, not our family. How could we have let this in?

My ribs hurt, or maybe it's my heart, and I shift to my back, throw my arm across my eyes and remember a time I was dumb enough to be jealous of Darry. I figured since he had to take on so much after we lost Mom and Dad, he was way too occupied to feel the sorrow I was forced to drown in. But the more I run, the more I realize there's never an escape from grief. And now I could weep over the brother I envied, the one I'd hated when I found him too hard, the one who carried all our weight on top of his own deep wounds.

I try not to worry over what else could happen. But they do say it always comes in threes. Well, sometimes, so do brothers.

As a boy, I would've never imagined Darry to become my closest friend. The person who's still my rock, even if it's taken him quite a bit longer to come back from this blow, the one that hit so hard. But he's there for me, showing up sporadically, whenever he can. He's there. Even if he always eyes his watch when you talk to him. It's subtle enough, his wrist turned ever so slightly, the glance down no more than a millisecond. But it's noticeable, and way back in our youth, I remember feeling I had to fight for Darry's time.

Why would the football star pay any attention to me? Me, the dreamy kid brother who spent hours in his room building intricate cities with wooden number blocks, before summoning Soda's troops of little green army men to storm the alphabet moats and conquer the chasms. The pride was as real as any breath that filled my chest, when a grinning Soda carefully staked his soldiers' conquests with toothpick flags of yarn. A triumphant red.

While Darry was busy perfecting a clean spiral throw and studying the playbooks, I was drawing up my version of the loneliest Lone Ranger along its margins.

But it didn't matter then that Darry might take the rarest of seconds to turn his head in my direction, because everything I could've said, all that skated on the tip of my boyhood tongue was suddenly lost to me, having been frozen in his stare of the most solid winter ice.

Of course I now know Darry's eyes belie his warmth, and I actually end up saying a whole lot whenever we're together as men. He shows up at the hospital cafeteria to eat breakfast with me most Saturday mornings. Early too. Before the soccer games and dance recitals eat away at his schedule. Before I'm holed up by my next shift, or I'm paged back into some code blue shitstorm, whichever comes first. Sure we talk about our wives, our jobs, the kids, our nephews, the bustling frontlines of the present. But it's the days gone by that throw thick shadows, that eclipse the here and now.

Our conversations drift across the years that cling to us, and we always end up in a place that time forgot. We ride that desert horseback, across the weeds of buckled train tracks. A lost town, where ruined sheets flap against the gaping holes of pockmarked buildings, and a rusted windmill creaks the sound of abandon.

But look. Across the long divide sits a tumbling of blocks, the paint chipped letters of a battle scarred moat. It's there we find our middle brother, beneath the fading flags of the palest red string. And we remember him and laugh about him and delight in him, talk about him and wonder where we went so wrong.

He checks his watch again but today he lingers, and in a warm pool of liquid blue, I swim into my oldest brother's stare.

And Darry listens. To me.

_But there was nothing we could do Darry, I tell him over and over. Nothing we could do._

**A/N: **Outsiders by SE Hinton

_Apologies for no dialogue and for this being vague. I'm just trying to dip my toes into the future, and trying to come to terms with it. Thanks for reading! _


End file.
